My last post was on the randomness of how a search let me to find out about other people discussing one of our companies.

I love random stories. It is truly odd how on the internet, everything is interlinked.

So - another story.

I was going through iBegin Geocoder’s stats when I noticed a forum post that kept sending us traffic. Turns out they were using us for ZIP Code latitude/longitude. Since we had recently released US Zip Code centroids for free, I registered on the forum, quoted that specific part, and said hey - since you are using iBegin already, why not just use this downloadable file. I posted in an as non-spammish way as possible.

Checked back the next day, the post was gone, and I was warned. I PMed the moderator, explaining that I was confused. He was pretty prompt, saying that a lot of first-time posters are spam, he will take a look at it.

The next day the post was restored and the moderator PMed me. As I viewed the skin design the site was using (remember, we do skins via vBSkins.com), I clicked on who had done their skin - Relivo. Imagine my surprise when I found out that not only were they using our Illacrimo WP theme (interesting considering they are a ‘design’ firm), the bastards had removed the accredition link on the bottom (something we do not allow).

So I tried to contact them, but of course, their bloody contact form was/is broken. But lo and behold, they are hosted by HostGator (the owner is a friend of mine), and their domain is registered via NameCheap (whose owner I also know).

Anyway - that is where the story stands for now. I still have to get them. And I will. But it is interesting how randomness can be so tied together.

I’ll have a post soon on how we use free themes to push our brand - in the meantime, you can preview our next freebie: GossipCity.

UPDATE: Seems like word travels fast, and Relivo has quickly updated the site. If a staff member did add it, why did no one question where it came from? Anyway - things got resolved purty quickly.

For those that don’t know, ‘edge cases’ are something that only happen in extreme cases. Rare, but also cause a bit of headaches.

So I was looking at the Stumble Upon reviews of CSS Basics (a site we own), when I laughed at the last page.

On the bottom is a ‘Next »’ even though it is the last page. Clicking on it takes you - nowhere. But what is more disappointing is that the page doesn’t even have 10 reviews (it is suppoused to be 10 reviews per page).

A small thing, not a big deal - but really that shouldn’t be happening.

It sure has been a while. As always, things keep happening at lightning speed.

I’ve talked about personal balance before (you need time away from work), but it seems like I can’t even follow that myself. From 8 am to 6 pm, and then back at it from 11 pm to 2-4 am, it seems like one day blurs into the next.

One of the things we had been grinding out (and finally released) was vB Skins. I had posted earlier about ForumTemplates.com and how it was going nowhere (when it came to Google). At that time Yahoo saw 800k backlinks - that number had since increased to 1.75 million. At that time Google saw roughly 155k backlinks - that number has again increased 235k.

And yet nothing. A painful penalization. So I went ahead and plunked $5000 and bought vbskins.com

There were of course other reasons in changing the site. The domain no longer fit (we just did vBulletin, not IPB/phpBB/vBulletin as we did originally). The design was crap - I actually lifted it from CSSFill (a semi-defunct site we own). And the code-base was absolutely terrible - another horrible experience in outsourcing (when we were smaller) that resulted in me having to go in and patch things up. The new site was (of course) all built in-house, and it shows - much nicer design, much more robust backend, smarter ordering system - superior in every way.

The lesson here is obvious - buying a domain that was previously parked is like playing with fire. Google not only ‘kills’ the domain when it is parked (nevermind they generate at least 50% of all domain parking revenue), but even when its up, when it gets links, when people find it useful - it is still knocked out.

We also have some huge organizational changes happening in-houses (in regards to a few of our divisions) - that should be interesting to talk about (when the time comes).

As I alluded to in my previous post (MadKast is stupid), a viable company is not what passes around for ‘entrepreneurship’ these days.

It is sad. Any Joe Blow with a computer and blogging software starts to blog. Good for him. He then starts to make money - even enough money to quit his day job and work on blogging fulltime. Good for him. But that is not a company. I would mark it as freelance work (you write stuff, people read it, and ‘pay’ you back in the form of clicking on ads). If you stop blogging, your company goes down the toilet in half a second flat.

If your ‘company’ does nothing while you go on a two week vacation - it isn’t a company then. Right now I can go away on a two week vacation. Sure I will have a lot of emails and work piled up while I am gone, but everything should hum along. My server admin will ensure the servers stay up (and check to make sure they are up). My managers will ensure every division is humming along, making progress (and money at the same time).

To me - a company can survive the loss of any one person (I have safeguards that if I was to die tomorrow, Enthropia Inc would still hum along). Sure, their might be a bit of a transition period, but my people know what is to be done. This post on entrepenurship by Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin is completely spot on. Nothing describes me better as point number one.

So think about it - are you really a company?

It is good to see that the high ground is still being espoused by people in power.

Replace ‘paid links’ with ’sponsored themes’ and you have the previous argument all over again - there is no definitive line between the two. This ain’t black and white.

My fellow cohort Jacob has written a nice post on sponsored themes: this ain’t black and white. My contribution was the title - I think it fits.

Sometimes it boggles my mind how badly websites are structured.

Take Canada Post. Try searching for ‘m5s 2t1′ - fails. Try searching for ‘M5S 2T1′ - success.

It would have taken the programmer literally 5 seconds to convert the postal code into all upper case.

The most popular specific searches across our local properties are always brand names - Sears, [local grocery chain], McDonalds, etc etc.

What has always boggled my mind is if you visit a franchise/national brand store (eg Sears or McDonalds), they all have a franchise locater. It is an obvious feature that people would like.

But what absolutely boggles my mind is why this data is locked? If I was McDonalds, I would want to make sure everyone knew where you could find McDonalds. I would want to make sure all closed down stores were not listed. I would make this data available for free.

The reality is, no matter how much they may want to crawl back into their cocoon, people use other sites to find their brands. Even niche players get a significant enough chunk of traffic. Sure, McDonalds may talk directly to SuperPages.com. And YellowPages.com. You can argue that it isn’t profitable enough for them to have a direct relationship with everyone - fine. But is it really in their interests to allow other companies to publish bad data? Of course not.

If I could sit down the responsible for their internet operations, I would just have one question to ask: “Why don’t you allow anyone and everyone to download a list of all [insert name here] locations? All these people are doing is *promoting* your business”

There is a lot of talk about walled gardens of data, and how web 2.0 is suppoused to change that. There are some legitimate reasons for walled gardens, but for franchise data? None.

Everyone is jumping on the ‘how to make money online’ idea, usually sprinkled with a dash of ‘digg-loving lists’.

But advice is suppoused to be something accumulate over the years. People who shouldn’t be dishing out advice are. And it is bad advice. To pick out an example: 5 myths about blogging.

Claim #1: “You have to be passionate about your subject”
If you want to be successful, damn straight you have to be passionate. To really ‘win’ you need to slog through the bad times. You need to put in the hours. And you won’t put in those hours unless you care.

Claim #2: “Focus on creating good content and the readers will come”
I agree to a certain degree - I had previously argued that unique content is not enough. Emphasizing enough. Yes you need to promote online - but half the battle is getting people to come (promotion), the other half is to keep them coming back (content).

Claim #3: “Commenting on lots of blogs will draw readers to your blog”
Commenting on other blogs is one of the best things I have done. Quality and quantity have no bearing on each other. I am a frequent commentator on various blogs - in the last 30 days I have commented on roughly 250 different posts. What commenting has done is two fold:
1. It qualifies who I am to other people. People associate a voice with who you are - in my case, I (like to think) that I comment thoughtfully. You can easily extend this concept to messageboards - often times as conferences I meet people who have read what I write and come away with a positive image.
2. It is a way of selling ‘hello’ to the blogger. Most bloggers watch comments on their blogs obsessively. Commenting is my way of saying ‘Hi, nice to meet you’. Many times I’ve commented on blogs for months before contacting the blogger - and when I do, the blogger knows who I am.

Claim #4: “You must stick to a regular posting schedule no matter what”
Yet again I disagree. I have more than enough anecdotal evidence that posting intelligently regularly is the best way to increase subscribers/traffic.

Claim #5: “The most popular blogs have the best content”
This one I actually agree with. It goes with my previous statement that you need both promotion and content.

So - one for five. Advice and good advice are two different beasts.

And some good advice on writing.

Yesterday was Apple’s WWDC 2007 event, complete with Steve Jobs’ keynote (many people felt disappointed by the announcements, but the hype was just nutty). We ourselves covered it live as it happened.

While it was going on, I went around and surfed other Mac sites. And what I found was highway robbery.

When all was said and done, we pushed roughly 150,000 pageviews during that event. People were refreshing the live page like mad, wanting to know what was going on.

It also made sense not to have any advertisements on that website - if someone is following a liveblogging event, that isn’t normal user behavior. They won’t look around at the site. They have one singular purpose - to get the news as it happens.

So when I visited sites like Engadget, all I could think of was - highway robbery.

Engadget is a big site, so a good example. If we did 150,000 pageviews, it is safe to say they did 1.5 million pageviews. For those looking at it from an advertiser’s perspective, 1500 blocks of 1000 ads.

The liveblogging that Engadget did was on a regular blog post. So people, wanting to know what was going on, kept refreshing that post. That post (of course) was complete with ads. So - if I was an advertiser paying $5 CPM, I basically just got burnt for $7500.

Donna Bogatin covered Greg Stuart’s keynote where he argued that of the $295 billion spent in advertising ever year, over $112 billion is wasted.

Ad networks are supposedly going to be more pro-active and assigning ‘quality scores’ to sites based on their advertising response - sites that throw up ads while doing a liveblogging event need to be hit hard.

Me and the missus were at the local Target today, looking for some odd and misc stuff.

We circled the entire store before we came across something we were looking for - full-length mirrors.

Wouldn’t it make sense for retail stores to have a little ’search kiosk’ at the end of each aisle? Let me put in a keyword (I’m sure they have meta-data associated with all their products), and it can tell me what aisle I should go to.

Wandering out? Not fun. Asking people? I don’t mind, but quite a few don’t. And as the population becomes more and more tech-savvy, it just makes sense.